The Book of Strange New Things (69 page)

‘Glad to meet you,’ said Flores. While that may have been an overstatement, she seemed quite free of Grainger’s unease.

‘You bring mediสีine?’ said Lover One.

‘Of course,’ said Flores, and went to the rear of the vehicle to fetch it. Several other Oasans ventured out from hiding, then several more. That was unusual: two or three had been the maximum in Peter’s experience.

Flores carried the box in her sinewy arms. It looked bigger and fuller than last time, perhaps because she was smaller than Grainger. Still, she wielded it without effort and handed it to one of the Oasans with smooth confidence.

‘To whom shall I address the explanations?’ she said.

‘I underสีรี่and more,’ said Jesus Lover One.

‘To you, then,’ said Flores, in a friendly but businesslike manner.

The box, as always, was crammed with a mixture of branded and unbranded medicines. Flores extracted each little plastic bottle, cardboard packet and tube, held it aloft like an auction hammer while describing its function, and slotted it back into place.

‘I’m not a pharmacist,’ she said. ‘But it’s all written on the labels and the leaflets anyway. The main thing is for you to tell us what’s working and not working. Pardon me saying so, but there’s been too much mystery here. Let’s take the mystery out of it, try more of a scientific approach. Think you can do that?’

Lover One was silent for a few seconds, just focusing on the creature standing head-to-head with him. ‘We are graรี่eful for mediสีine,’ he said at last.

‘That’s nice,’ said Flores flatly. ‘But listen: this here is a packet of Sumycin. It’s an antibiotic. If you get an infection in your water-works or your guts, it could fix you. But if you’ve taken a lot of Sumycin in the past, it might not work so well. You might be better taking this one here, Amoxicillin. These two packets of Amoxicillin are generics . . . ’

‘Name from where all other name come,’ said Jesus Lover One.

‘That’s right. Now, Amoxicillin is fine if you’ve never had it before, but if your body has become resistant to it, you’re better with this purple one here, Augmentin, which has some extra stuff in it to overcome that resistance.’ Flores put the Augmentin back in the box and scratched her nose with a simian finger. ‘Listen, we could stand here all day talking about the pros and cons of each and every antibiotic in this box. But what we really need is to match up specific drugs with specific problems. For example, take you. Are you sick?’

‘Thank God no,’ said Lover One.

‘Well, bring out someone who
is
sick and let’s talk.’

There was a pause. ‘We are graรี่eful for mediสีine,’ said Lover One. ‘We have food for you.’ The tone was neutral, and yet there was stubbornness, even threat in it.

‘Great, thanks, we’ll get around to that in a minute,’ said Flores, unswayed. ‘But first, can I meet someone who thinks they need antibiotics? As I said, I’m not a pharmacist. I’m not a doctor. I would just prefer to get a little better acquainted with you folks.’

As the two of them stood their ground, more Oasans ventured out from shelter. Peter realised that they must always have been there, in the past, whenever these handovers were done, but had lacked the courage to emerge into view. What was it about Flores? Her smell, perhaps? Peter turned to Tuska. Tuska winked.

‘Obey the mighty Flores,’ he said wryly. ‘Or else.’

Once it had become clear that the handover was going to take some time, Peter excused himself and began to walk across the tundra to his church. It was quite a windy day, and his dishdasha flapped around his ankles, but the breeze was useful in reducing the humidity, promoting the illusion of fresher oxygen. Inside his sandals his feet were already slippery with sweat. He looked down at them as he walked, and recalled the sensation of stepping into crisp snow with thick-soled boots on a raw January morning in Richmond Park with his newly divorced father smoking a cigarette nearby. No sooner had he glimpsed the image than it was gone.

Every now and then as he crossed the plain to the temple that he and his flock had built, he looked over his shoulder, in case Lover One was following. But Lover One was not following, and Peter’s view of the tiny figures near the USIC vehicle grew indistinct through the blur of interlapping air currents.

When he reached his church, he extended his palms and swung open the doors, expecting to find the place empty. But no. There were fifty or sixty brightly coloured souls gathered inside, already seated in the pews, as if by firm pre-arrangement. Not the full congregation, but a healthy turnout – especially considering they’d gathered to worship on their own, with no pastor. Quite a few of them had been working in the whiteflower fields on the day of his downfall, and had witnessed the piercing of his flesh, had watched the vermin’s teeth mutilate him so badly that there could be no hope of survival, even with the Technique of Jesus. Maybe this gathering was a memorial service for Father Peรี่er, and here he was, gatecrashing it.

A murmur of wonder passed through the crowd. Then a swell of communal elation charged the air, taking up palpable space, pushing against the walls, threatening to lift the ceiling. If he’d wanted to, he could have done anything with them at this moment, taken them anywhere. They were his.

‘God bleสี our reunion, Father Peรี่er,’ they exclaimed, first one-by-one, then as a chorus. Each voice aggravated the grief in his chest a little more. Their faith had been buoyed up to the heavens, and he had come to let them down.

The doors thudded shut behind him, their well-oiled motion aided by the wind. Plentiful light beamed through the windows, illuminating the hooded heads of the Jesus Lovers so that they glowed like candle-flames in a votive rack. As he walked between the pews, the surreal montage of paintings on the ceiling hung heavy over him. Lover Twelve’s bright pink Jesus walking hand in hand with a glistening grey Lazarus, Lover Fourteen’s blue and yellow Nativity, Lover Twenty’s Mary Magdalene spewing forth ectoplasmic devils, Lover Sixty-Three’s Thomas the Doubter . . . and, of course, Lover Five’s painting of the risen Christ and his women, secure in its place, fastened with extra care after the accident that had maimed her. The scarecrow in the loincloth, so different from the kindly
mensch
of Christian tradition, had suddenly become terrifying. The blaze of light where His head should be and the eye-shaped holes in His starfish hands, which Peter had once taken as evidence that God could not be confined to the iconography of one race, now struck him as proof of an unbreachable gulf.

He took his stand behind the pulpit. He noted that the สีฐฉั had tidied his bed, washed and dried and folded the linen, cleaned the boots that Lover Five had sewn for him, and placed a mislaid pencil on the pillow where it could be admired as a sacred relic by future generations. Now, blessed with his miraculous return, they sat in rapt attention, Bible booklets at their side, awaiting the call to sing the first hymn, which might, according to custom, be ‘In The Garden’ or ‘For God Be The Glory’. He cleared his throat. He trusted, against hope, that inspiration would come from somewhere, as it always had before.

‘สีคฐڇ๙ฉ้,’ he said. ‘คssฐڇ. สีคฐ ฉ้น สีฐฉ้รี่t ฐurฐ ฉ้นรี่ณs ณฉ้ssนรี่ณฐ.’

Some of the congregation made the shoulder-trembling motions he’d always interpreted as laughter. He hoped it
was
laughter, elicited by his clumsy pronunciation, but maybe he’d never really known what those motions meant after all.

‘สีคssฐڇ รี่tฐ สีssคฉ้ สีค Jesus คฐڇ๙ฉ้s,’ he continued. He could sense their bemusement at his strained and childish speech, so unnecessary when they were only too willing to listen to the holy language of James the King. But he wanted to address them, just once, in a way that they could fully understand. He owed them that much: their dignity at the expense of his own. ‘๙ฉ้ss Jesus สีรี่t สีฐฉั สีค สีค คฐ.’

He finished his exact tally of the worshippers, begun as a habitual reflex: fifty-two. He would never know how many more souls were concealed in the settlement, never know how far away he’d been from bringing the entire community to Christ. He only knew that he recognised each and every person here, and not just by the colours of their robes.

‘รี่ คฐڇ๙ฉ้ss สีฐฉ้ค ฐurฐ สีฐ,’ he said, ‘ฐڇ๙ฉ้ss สีฐณฐฉ้ค the Book of Strange New Things.’ He extracted the King James Bible from his bag, and, instead of thumbing the gilt-edged pages to a selected passage for reading aloud, he stepped out from behind the pulpit and carried the book to the Jesus Lovers in the front pew. With fastidious gentleness – not because of reverence for the book, but because of concern for the fragile flesh before him – he handed it to Lover Seventeen, who cradled it in her lap.

He returned to the pulpit. ‘สีฐ สีรี่ รี่ สีฐ,’ he said, ‘ฉ้ค คssฐ สีssสีรี่ God. สีฐ God คฉ้ สีค คฐฉ้ss ฉ้นรี่ ๙ฉ้ss ณนรี่ณ.’

A thrill of consternation was passing through his flock. Heads tilted, hands agitated. Lover Fifteen uttered a cry.

‘คฐสีฐ ڇสีคss ๙ฉ้ss ฉ้ God ฉ้น คฐڇ รี่ณฐ ๙ฉ้ss,’ he pressed on. ‘ฉ้ค tสีฐ รี่ รี่ฉ้ค สีฐ รี่ฉ้สี ฐ สีฐฉ้ค คssฐڇ๙ฉ้ss Jesus Lover Five . . . ’ His voice broke, and he had to grip the wings of his pulpit to keep himself from trembling. ‘Jesus Lover Five สีฐฉั สีฐ ๙ฉ้l รี่iฐ สีฐฉัค สีรี่t รี่ณฐ. คฉ้ สีฉ้ สีฐรี่ ณนรี่ณ USIC.’ He took a deep, shuddering breath. สีฐรี่t๙สีรี่ สีรี่ڇ ครี่ฐڇ๙ฉ้ รี่ สีฐรี่t ฐurฐ. คฐ คڇ รี่ณฐ ๙สีรี่ฐڇ สีค Bea. รี่tฐ สีค ฉ้ss . . . ’

And that was it: he could go no further: the word he needed, the most crucial word, was one he didn’t know in the สีฐฉั language. He bowed his head, and took refuge, at the last, in his own foreign tongue.

‘ . . . forgive.’

He left the pulpit, picked up the canary-yellow boots, one in each hand, and walked stiffly down the aisle, towards the exit. For the first few seconds, which felt like minutes, he walked in silence, alone. Then the Jesus Lovers rose from their seats and gathered all around him, touching him tenderly on the shoulders, the back, the abdomen, the buttocks, the thighs, anywhere they could reach, while saying, in clear, unhampered voices, ‘Forgive.’

‘Forgive.’

‘Forgive.’

‘Forgive.’

‘Forgive.’

‘Forgive,’ each in their turn, until he blundered through the doors into the harsh sunlight.

On the way back to the settlement, as his flaccid, empty bag flapped against his waist, he looked around several times at his church silhouetted against the brilliant sky. No one had emerged from it but him. Belief was a place that people didn’t leave until they absolutely must. The สีฐฉั had been keen to follow him to the kingdom of Heaven, but they weren’t keen to follow him into the valley of doubt. He knew that one day – maybe very soon – they would have another pastor. They’d taken from him what they needed, and their search for salvation would go on when he was long gone. After all, their souls dreamt so ardently of a longer stay in the flesh, a longer spell of consciousness. It was natural: they were only human.

Back at the USIC jeep, things had moved on. Lover One was nowhere to be seen, the medicines had all been distributed, and the food was being loaded into the vehicle. More สีฐฉั than usual were involved, quite a crowd of them. Both Tuska and Flores were available to take hold of the tubs, sacks and tins brought out to them, but Peter noticed, even from a distance, that the สีฐฉั approached Flores first, and detoured to Tuska only when Flores already had her hands full. He figured it out at last: they liked her. Who would’ve thought it? They liked her.

‘Let me carry that,’ said Tuska, as Flores took charge of a particularly heavy bag of whiteflower dough.

‘I’m OK,’ said Flores. Her hair was plastered with sweat, emphasising the smallness of her skull, and blue veins stood out on her temples. Her whole torso was sodden. She was having a grand time.

A little while later, when the three of them were seated in the vehicle and Tuska was driving away from C-2, she said:

‘We’re going to crack them, Joe.’

‘Crack them?’ echoed Tuska.

‘Find out what makes them tick,’ she explained.

‘Yeah?’ said Tuska, clearly not much interested in the prospect.

‘Yes. And then, God willing, we’ll fix them.’

Peter was surprised to hear such words uttered by a USIC employee. But then Flores’s face appeared in the gap between the front seats, like a gargoyle head jutting out from a Gothic wall, seeking out the minister stashed in the back.

‘Just a figure of speech, you understand,’ she said. ‘I really meant, with luck.’ Her face vanished again, but she wasn’t done talking. ‘I guess you don’t believe there’s such a thing as luck, huh?’

Peter turned his face to stare out the window. At the speed Tuska was driving, the dark earth could be mistaken for tarmac, and the occasional outcrop of pale wildflower swept past in a blur like the painted white lines of a motorway. If he imagined hard enough, he might even see M25 road signs estimating the distance to London.

‘I hope there is,’ he answered Flores, a little too late. He was pretty sure the word ‘luck’ appeared nowhere in the Bible, but that didn’t mean there was no such thing. Grainger had called him a lucky guy. And, with Bea at his side, for the best part of his life, he truly had been.

When he got back to his quarters, there was, finally, a message from Bea.

It said,

Peter, I love you. But please, don’t come home. I beg you. Stay where you are.

28

Amen

‘What I like about this place,’ said Moro, making brisk progress on her treadmill, ‘is that every day there’s something a little bit different, but also it’s the same.’

She, BG and Peter were exercising in the gazebo. It was just another day on Oasis, another scheduled break in the task at hand, a few hours of R&R before work resumed on the great project. The canopy was shading them from the sun, but the light was so intense at this stage of the afternoon that it penetrated the canvas, casting a yellow tinge over their flesh.

Moro had worked up a big sweat already; the fabric of her shalwar was sculpted to her thighs as she paced, and her bare midriff glistened. She had announced three hundred steps as her goal and must be about halfway through by now, never letting the rhythm slacken. She swivelled her wrists on the treadmill’s handle-bars, as if revving the throttle grip of a motorcycle.